


drowning

by quagmires



Series: birds on a wire [1]
Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV), A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Implied Child Abuse, Trans Character, no brakes on the pain train buckle up yall, no graphic descriptions just implications of terrible things, therapist!snicket, therapy au, you can decide if he’s a good therapist or not
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-10-12 18:03:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17472347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quagmires/pseuds/quagmires
Summary: The thing about drowning is, you have to take a breath eventually.





	1. doors

**Author's Note:**

> this isn’t supposed to be super graphic and pretty much all of the stuff tagged is only mentioned or implied, but if you’re super easily set off then consider this a final warning.

“You’re quiet today, Violet.”

His voice is deep and soothing, and she can barely remember to pick it apart from the lulling ambience of the room, with the way it melts into the background. It feels like he’s putting her to sleep, like he can tell she’s hiding her pills under her tongue at night until she can hide them in her piggy bank. And now he’s trying to make her sleep to make up for it. The mere entertainment of such an idea makes her snap out of her own little bubble entirely. For a split second she panics that he can actually know that, just by looking at her. But then she calms herself. Of course he can’t. Now she’s just acting like her brother. 

“Am I?” she asks, monotone. She’s trying to be venomous, but her heart isn’t in it anymore. It’s been a long time since she pretended to care about what a therapist thought of her. Her last shrink never heard a single word from her; Violet had just sat in stony silence, glaring until the hour was up every single week. The one before that was subject to more verbal abuse than one would expect from someone of her age. She’d hardly expect it either, if she could ever look in a mirror again. It was maybe the one she felt a little guilty over. 

This new one was different. He seems to have stepped out of a grainy black and white photograph and into the real world, and still isn’t sure how to act. He has an interesting name, too. One she can never quite remember. It makes him interesting, but not interesting enough for Violet to ever consider opening up to him completely. Just intriguing enough for her to continue observing him. 

He takes a deep breath and rubs his forehead slowly. His dark two-piece suit sighs with him. Violet watches him scribble down more notes, probably about her behavior this week. From here, the handwriting looks like nothing but a bunch of loops. But he must be writing something, because her parents are handed a very thorough typed report each month. They always smell of new ink, and never contain a spelling or grammatical error. Perfect novellas detailing her stubborn refusal to get better. 

He’s good at his job, she’ll give him that. But she doesn’t have to like it. 

His pen clicks. He holds it funny, like he doesn’t actually know what a pen is. “You are. Usually you...sit down, say hello even if you don’t want to because it’s the polite thing to do, and then you try to speak as little as possible. But today you’ve said nothing. You’re thinking.”

The thing is, he never gives her any of that condescending nonsense, no soppy tone when he talks about how he wants to listen to her problems and help. He just sits, and observes her as casually as if he’s out birdwatching, and waits for her to talk. 

What’s weirder is that it actually works sometimes. 

“I am thinking,” she says before she can stop herself. The pen is still grasped in his fist, but it doesn’t look poised for writing. So she continues, albeit hesitantly. 

“Not about anything.” A pause. “But also about everything.”

He understands immediately. 

“Has it stopped you from sleeping?”

Shit, she thinks. He does know. Or maybe he just sees the heavy bags under her eyes, so dark they look more like bruises. 

“Sometimes,” she says, which is code for ‘always’. 

“Because you need to check?”

Violet doesn’t say anything, and he didn’t have to ask. It’s always the checking. Every single complex function her brain processes is eventually whittled down by thoughts of nothing and everything until it becomes a compulsive need to check. 

There, he’s doing it again. Waiting in total silence, watching her. Not scrutinizing, no. It’s casual. Almost like for a moment he’s becoming a normal person, instead of an old photograph. And being a normal person means he’s just sitting across from her, looking nowhere in particular, but he happens to be looking nowhere in particular right in her direction. 

It works. She caves. And she hates it. 

“A screw in the top-left hinge was a little looser than the rest,” she huffs, and stares at her feet like they’re a difficult math question. “It needed a flat-head screwdriver. There were only phillips heads in the house.”

“What time was this?”

“Three in the morning.”

“So what did you do next?”

“I...cried.” Violet shifts uncomfortably, embarrassed to admit it. “A lot. I stood in front of that hinge and cried and cried at it until I got so frustrated, I...”

They both look down at her bandaged arm. Today’s elephant in the room. It hadn’t even seemed like a great idea at the time, but she wasn’t thinking right. She never was, in those moments. But she definitely hadn’t considered that taking to her own arm with a screwdriver would cause as much damage as it had. A lot of blood and several stitches later, and she feels like the stupidest person in the world. 

“Mother and father are used to it,” she continues guiltily, “I think they were a little surprised by how late it was. But they drove me to the hospital anyway.”

“And you feel bad about that.”

He doesn’t assume, he knows. It’s so obvious how horrid she feels about it all. No decent kid wants to force their mother, six months pregnant, to wake from the sleep she barely gets anymore, all because they stabbed themselves over something as inconsequential as a door hinge. 

“Klaus didn’t want to look at me when I got home,” she says. She’s spoken about this before: her brother doesn’t hate her for it. He’s not angry. And it’s not like she tried to kill herself — not this time around, anyway. He just gets so worked up with worries and what ifs that he scares himself beyond all reason, and right now the only way he knows how to deal with the panic is to block out the cause. 

She gets it. It’s just another weird way to cope. But it still hurts. 

There’s another question coming. Now that she’s started talking, he won’t let her stop quite so easily. She can feel the stiff tension in the room rising. Like black water out of a drain, or blood from a stab wound. It makes her feel like there are rocks in her chest. 

“What were you checking for, Violet?”

Of course. Of course it’s... _that_. It’s a rudimentary question that she’s heard a million times from a million people. But it’ll lead to another question, which will lead to another, and another, and another. This is why she doesn’t like to talk. If she lets him, he’ll lead her through door after door until she’s in a dark place that she’d rather die than go back to. 

She shakes her head. ‘Done speaking’, is what it means. It’s all laid out in front of her, like a series of stepping stones across a dark, polluted pond. She can see where it’ll end, and she doesn’t like it. If he wants to know the hows and whys of it all, he can read her case file. 

Not that everyone doesn’t already know why she’s here. 

“You’re an inventor,” he says, leaning back in his chair. She cocks an eyebrow at him, curious about the direction this is taking, “Would you say doors are one of mankind’s greatest inventions? Like fire, or the wheel?”

Her thoughts on such a statement are more complex than a simple shrug can convey, but nevertheless that’s what she gives him. 

He continues, “You probably know that fire helps us see in the dark or keep warm or cook food, and wheels are used to make it easier to move heavy objects, or to move faster. But doors only have two purposes: to keep things in, and to keep things out.”

Violet feels uncomfortable. Instead of a metaphorical sandstone, those rocks in her chest are now made of lead: dense and sickening. She squirms in her seat, gripping the cushioned arms that are so tall she feels like she’s sitting in a box. He sees her discomfort, but he doesn’t stop talking. 

“So I can see why a faulty hinge would feel troublesome, if the door’s purpose of keeping someone out was suddenly compromised,” he says. It’s like he’s reading machinery manuals to her, the way he talks about it. She hates it, she _hates_ it. “But it’s one less thread, in one screw, in one hinge, in a locked door. Surely that wouldn’t bother you by now.” 

“I know it isn’t rational,” she mutters. She refuses to look at him now, “Don’t you think I know that? I’ve always known that, but it never makes it any better...”

His suit sighs with him again. He writes something down, like an afterthought. Now she’s convinced he _is_ just scribbling on the paper. Then he glances up at her — she’s still not looking up from her feet, but she can tell — and clicks the pen a few times. Once again, it feels alien in his fist. 

“Then you aren’t taking your pills.”

Violet has always considered herself too mature to act indignant. But if that’s not how she feels right now then she isn’t sure how to describe the way she glares up at the psych and stomps her foot at him. 

“They weren’t working anyway.” she insists, trying to snarl rather than pout. 

“If you haven’t been taking them, how do you know they won’t work?”

“They make me feel tired. I don’t like that.”

Now he’s starting to look exasperated. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen it on him before, although it’s still very...off. Like a stiff replica of an emotion rather than the real thing. “That’s why they’re given to you at night. There’s nothing wrong with getting a good night’s rest, even if some people claim otherwise.”

The whole conversation has made her too distressed to even think of asking who in the world claims that sleep is bad for you. Her nails have moved from the arms of the chair and are now digging into the skin just above her knees — it’s starting to hurt. 

“I-If it makes me _too_ tired, I won’t wake up when I need to. And if I do, I’ll be groggy and slow and...and—”

“And vulnerable?”

“He’s going to come back!” she yells. Her chest is tight and the rocks feel like they’ve been put in a cement mixer to clang around. “I know it — I know he is! And if I can’t stay awake then I can’t fix the door and then he’ll get inside and be on the stairs and in the hallways and in my room and in _Klaus’_ room a-and...”

All that inky water and blood rising out of the drain has gotten to be too much. It’s just gotten higher and higher until she was drowning in it, like she knew she would be. The air in the room makes her throat burn, dry and scratchy and choking out sobs even though she’s tried _so hard_ not to cry. All she can think to do is squeeze her eyes shut tight and pray it goes away before she does something stupid. Again. 

The thing about drowning is, you have to take a breath eventually, regardless of whether you find the surface again or not. When his voice permeates through the darkness behind her scrunched up eyes, reminding her what he and the last doctor and the one before that all taught her, she can’t ignore it. She can’t just _not_ breathe, though she sometimes wishes that wasn’t the case. Air rushes in through her nose, fills her lungs to try replace the water, hisses out between grit teeth, then repeats the cycle. 

Seven seconds. Four seconds. Eight seconds. It takes a lot more effort to breathe properly than one would think. She’s concentrating hard, agitatedly pushing the heels of her hands down the front of her dress, from her hips to her knees — fingers splayed and palms facing forward, like she’s pushing away a ghost. 

“I can’t...let it be my fault again...” And just like that, it’s over. The rocks weighing her down like breeze-blocks, the ink and offal filling up her lungs — it’s all been replaced by exhaustion and a horrid feeling of defeat. Where once she felt heavy, now she just feels empty. 

He offers her a tissue box, she takes several and tries to hide the evidence of her breakdown. Maybe he tells her something pathetic, like that it isn’t her fault or that none of this will happen. Maybe he just tells her she needs to start taking those pills again. She doesn’t listen either way. The clock has ticked ten minutes over, and she wants out. She throws away the used tissues and smooths her skirt over the eight new crescent moons stinging just above her knees. The minute the session is over, she doesn’t care what he has to say. 

“Same time next week.” He tells her. 

Violet looks at him bitterly, her jaw set, then walks out of his office without a word. She wants to erase every vulnerability she showed this past hour. The irrationality, the indignation, the fear and blind panic. It was all a consequence of letting him open too many doors. Next time, she’ll fix the hinges.


	2. drainpipe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He feels like he’s drowning in worry and halogen lights.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for mentioned dysphoria  
> i find these chapters very cathartic to write. normal coping strategies? never heard of her ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ 
> 
> i hope you enjoy, and if you like my work i might start taking fic commissions again ;3

It feels like he’s in a jail cell. 

Granted, it’s a pretty shitty jail cell because he’s only here for one hour a week. And he didn’t even do anything _wrong_ , but he still feels like he’s being punished for something. He’s been told over and over that it’s not his fault, _never_ his fault, even when he doesn’t express guilt over the things out of his control. 

Maybe it’s his age — despite him always be ‘beyond his years’ this and ‘top of the class’ that — that causes the people in his life to believe he just doesn’t understand. Just _what_ he apparently doesn’t understand, he isn’t quite sure. All he knows is that it’s been hammered into his head that he isn’t to blame for anything that happened to him. 

So naturally, he starts to worry that it _is_ his fault. On some subatomic, subconscious level, he’s set off this whirlwind of domino and butterfly effects that ruined his formative years. And now he’s being punished for it in therapy. 

Sometimes, his mind makes out the man or woman sitting across from him to be a detective rather than a doctor. They’re two very different professions, but how can he tell? Especially if it’s a detective _pretending_ to be a doctor. Sometimes he worries this is all still part of one big court case and somehow, having him talk about his mental development like a broken record counts as valuable evidence. So he can’t afford to screw it up. 

When he had to change doctors, on account of the fact that Violet went through them like a bullet through brain matter, and it was just easier if they both saw the same person, his perspective got a little better. It still felt like a prison, just not one with cameras and lie detectors and mind readers everywhere. A prison he could get out of. All he had to do was behave. 

Behaving is easy for him, unlike most boys his age. He was always the quiet one, the obedient one. He won’t lie, sometimes behaving is difficult. But this time around, it just means taking his pills and keeping a journal as best he can and trying to be honest. And he can do that. Maybe. 

Lately he’s been so good at behaving that they deemed it safe for him to only be here once every two weeks, instead of every week. And, if he continues to make progress, it won’t be long before he’s only here once a month. And then maybe one day, he won’t have to be here at all. 

Violet was _seething_ when she found out. She wouldn’t admit to being jealous, but it showed in the way she set her jaw and ground her teeth together until their mother told her off for it. Maybe the week she had to go in twice wasn’t the best time for that news to coincide with. 

But he’s _good_ at behaving. He’s good at it for a reason. A reward is so much better than a punishment. Rewards make him feel warm and fuzzy inside, and even when he tries not to smile because then it feels like he’s being a show-off, he can’t help but beam. 

Likewise, the knowledge that he’s doing the wrong thing is usually punishment enough. It fills him with guilt. Even when it isn’t his fault. 

Even when, for once, he tries to tell _himself_ it isn’t his fault, the threat of disappointment alone feels like a smack in the face. 

Only a week has passed since last time instead of two, and he’s back again. 

(It isn’t his fault. It isn’t.) 

That guilt is swirling around inside, sucking the air out of his throat like someone reached into his rib cage and pulled the plug. Now he’s watching it all try to go down at once. 

(He used to have nightmares about the awful sucking noise a plug hole made when you drained water from the bathtub. Lots of kids probably have those kinds of dreams. But he had it worse than most.)

Klaus likes the new case worker. He knows Violet doesn’t, but that’s okay. Some people just don’t like other people. In Violet’s case, she doesn’t seem to like _any_ other people (besides him, and their parents, and their baby brother or sister). But Klaus likes him. The odd way he talks, how neat his office is (maybe too neat, like he doesn’t spend any time in it), the smell of fresh typewriter ink on everything he touches even when he’s always immaculately clean. He seems to be a little...what’s the word he’s looking for? It’s a big word — he learned it a few weeks ago. 

Esoteric. 

As always, Klaus waits for him to speak first. And, as always, he does. “I did not think I’d see you back here so soon, Klaus Baudelaire.”

Usually he likes being called by his full name, but this time it just makes him feel more like he’s being scolded. What’s that saying? That the more parts of your full name your parents use, the more trouble you’re in? 

“I’ve been nervous lately,” he admits. It’s easy to open up about surface-level things. He still picks and chooses what information he shares, like he’s trying to cover up a lie. But he’s not lying. He knows he isn’t. Even after all those years of being told he’d be called a liar for telling the truth. “Actually...I’ve been more than nervous. I’ve been anxious.” 

“Have you been taking your medication when you should?”

He nods. It tastes bad, but household chemicals taste worse. 

The man hums, solemnly, and rolls the ball of his pen across the page. It leaves a metallic-smelling ribbon of black behind it. “Could it be about what happened to your sister?”

He nods again and rubs his arm. “It’s been giving me nightmares...”

“About what she did?”

“Kind of. But not the most recent thing.” He takes a deep breath. “It...It’s the bathtub dream again.”

The writing stops. Klaus looks up to see blue-grey eyes studying him carefully. He may as well have admitted to something a lot more groundbreaking with the way he’s being stared down. 

Then the interrogation starts. 

He’s asked if he’s reliving the experience exactly as it happened, if it’s more of a memory than a surreal, frightening dream. The two are very different, surprisingly. But Klaus shakes his head and curls his knees up to his chest. “It’s from someone else’s perspective. Not mine.”

The shrink sighs and begins to write again. Klaus doesn’t think he’s ever seen the man write this much during their sessions before. “So someone else is in the room with you?”

“Yes.”

“What are they doing?”

“Usually nothing...” Klaus frowns into his lap, acting as though he has to dig deep for the exact memory of those dreams. As though it isn’t constantly in the back of his mind. ”Sometimes they help, but it’s always me. They never help Violet. I try to tell them she’s hurt too, but I’m choking.”

“What are you choking on, Klaus?”

“Blood. They...” He itches his nose on the back of his sleeve. It’s a horrible habit. “They don’t even notice she’s there when they take me away.”

The dream always ends there, as he gets dragged out into a dark hallway. Even as they get further away, he can still see the scene unfolded under the halogen lights. The tub is overflowing with blood at the same rate that his mouth is, both leaving crimson puddles on the floor that just keep growing. The drain must be blocked. 

He laughs a little, dry and humorless and mostly directed into his lap. Talking about the bathtub dream isn’t amusing one bit, it just kind of happens without his permission. The man across from him has an eyebrow raised, almost in skepticism but most likely in nothing more than curiosity. Klaus clears his throat and shrinks back a little. 

“Sorry, I...I used to have night terrors about plugholes as a child.” He sniffs awkwardly. “I used to think there was a monster hiding in the drainpipe that sucked up all the water, and if I got too close it’d come up and eat me.” 

He blinks. Where was he going with this? “I just think...uh...it’s weird that I used to have bad dreams about what might come up, but now they’re about what might go down.”

Plenty of things can fit down a drain if you let it get away from you. Bleach. Vomit. Teeth. Bile. Blood. Things far worse to imagine than any monster that might come up. Just the slightest notion of that gory cocktail swirling around makes Klaus feel ill and pale. His stomach starts to mimic the same dizzying patterns, round and round and round. For a moment he genuinely thinks he might throw up. Or pass out. 

The interrogation continues. 

He answers all the man’s questions, but he isn’t really _there_. Too busy thinking. 

No, he hasn’t used that specific bathroom in a long time. About three years. Yes, there are other bathrooms in the house. No, he only showers now. Because baths make him feel like he’s drowning in worry and halogen lights. 

Yes he’s aware that he’s allowed to let go of the past. Yes he knows that he’s alive, and Violet’s alive — they may be alive, but they aren’t okay. It’s hard to let go of what could have been, and with all due respect sir if he could make the choice to stop worrying about it, he would. 

Sometimes it’s hard to stay calm; sometimes he gets irritated and bites out a sarcastic remark instead of biting his tongue. 

He feels some more guilt pile on as silence passes between them, but not as much as he thinks he should. For a moment he considers apologizing, then balls his hands into fists in his lap and resists. Why say it if he’s not as sorry as he could be? 

“You’re angry. Remember what we said about bottling up emotions?”

Klaus takes a deep, shaky breath as tears start to sting his eyes. “That it’s bad?”

“That it’s bad.” He’s set down his pen. “What are you angry at?”

Klaus hesitates. His first answer is _you, you’re the one I’m angry at_ , but he doesn’t want to be so callous. The counselor doesn’t look like much would offend him, but he’d still feel bad if he said something mean. 

“...Myself,” is what he finally concedes. 

It’s not the truth, but it isn’t a lie. 

He’s angry at the barrage of nightmares, the lingering memories he puts under a microscope time and time again. His perpetual need to analyze, analyze, analyze has left him feeling half-removed. A word feels more made up the more it’s repeated, in the same way your own face starts to shift into the uncanny valley the longer you look at yourself in a mirror. 

He exists just a little left of center. This body isn’t his. In effect, he’s just watching the burglary and vandalism of a house that he doesn’t live in. Watching it burn from across the street. 

The smoke is still suffocating him all the way over here. 

He’s angry that he let it come to this. 

(It’s his fault.)

He knows correlation isn’t the same as causation. But he still thinks that maybe he wouldn’t be treading water in the uncanny valley every time he so much as looked in a mirror, or changed his clothes, or entered the bathroom. 

Maybe if the house hadn’t been vandalized, he’d want to live there now. 

Or maybe he thinks gutting and repainting it would make it feel less like the house it used to be. The house that someone set fire to. 

(He imagines taking a proper hunting knife, drawing a line from groin to sternum with surgical precision and well and truly _gutting_ himself. Cutting out all the impurities — all the tumors _He_ had put there. But he already knows from experience that won’t work.)

In the end, he knows that isn’t true. But that doesn’t stop the guilt and the doubt. 

(The guilt and the doubt is never gonna stop. He knows that too.)

The man is looking at him quizzically. Like he’s a researcher instead of a counselor. That gets the alarm bells ringing in Klaus’ head again. Maybe this _is_ all just an elaborate setup, to record him and his experiences so they can parade him out in front of a room of people and force him to spill the truths nobody was ever going to believe. Make him stare down the person who caused all this. And realize that people _do_ believe, and somehow that feels worse than being called a liar. 

(He’d promised not to tell. And he’d gone and broken that promise and now he has to live with fear of punishment.)

(Usually thinking he did something wrong is punishment enough.)

The man across from him takes a deep breath. The creases across the middle of his suit jacket unfold like an accordion as he does. “You’re a smart boy, Klaus Baudelaire,” he says. His voice is smooth but factual. It isn’t condescending, but it’s definitely not helping the paranoia. “And you’re, usually, quite rational. You’ve been visiting bi-weekly for two months now, so the fact that you’re back so soon means you can tell something is wrong. You know—”

“What if everything’s a lie?” Klaus blurts out. He can feel his right eye twitching from all the stress — he takes off his glasses and grinds the heel of his hand into the socket before it can start feeling like a parasite. 

“What if none of that ever happened and I’m lying because I remembered it wrong? What if I’m not really a boy and I’m lying because I can only think about what happened every time I look in a mirror? What if this is just another taped interview they’ll use as evidence?”

Now he’s frantic. And being frantic means he isn’t thinking clearly, his mind too clouded with panic. His hands run through his hair shakily: a clear sign of stress. They don’t feel like his hands, they feel bigger and older and sickeningly gentle. He has to shake himself out of it before they belong to him again, but he still feels like he’s going to be sick. 

“The court hearing happened three years ago.” The man puts his pen and notepad down entirely, and folds his hands in his lap. He’s thinking rationally in Klaus’ stead, and tackling one problem at a time. “He won’t be tried again for the same crime.”

“Right.” He places his glasses back on his nose and takes a deep breath. “The double jeopardy law...” 

(He’d started reading lots of legal tomes three years ago, and still hadn’t stopped. If he didn’t know how the legal system worked, how can he trust it to keep him safe?)

That puts one issue to bed, and a second one starts to wilt, also when scrutinized from a legal standpoint. If a whole courtroom full of people had declared...had declared _Him_ guilty, then Klaus shouldn’t worry about whether it happened or not. He’s smart, but not smart enough to lie to a judge and jury and be believed. 

“I’m not qualified to tell you what you are and what you aren’t,” the counselor sighs. Like he can already tell what Klaus is most worried about. “But I am qualified to tell you that you aren’t a split personality, or delusional. You have post-traumatic stress on two accounts, and you doubt yourself because of it. You—”

“Wait.”

“Yes?”

He swallows nervously. “Two...Two accounts?”

The man’s eyes meet him with recognition, steely grey and understanding that the boy in his office hasn’t considered the most obvious detail. 

“The bathtub?”

The penny drops, Klaus can almost feel it clattering against his ribs on the way down. “That...That’s not....” He doesn’t want to talk about it. Even so much as thinking about it makes him feel dizzy. All the blood and pain and panic swirling around in the water. Making it dark, almost black. How is he expected not to constantly think about that? 

Slowly, the realization dawns on him, that he is truly terrified by this. He hangs his head in defeat. 

(Just another thing to feel broken by.)

“...Do I have to see you every week again?” he sighs. He knows the answer. Sure enough, he looks up to see his therapist nodding, almost gravely. 

Klaus doesn’t argue. What is there to say that hasn’t already been shown in how poorly he’s been coping lately? 

There’s that familiar feeling of disappointment. That everyone looking at him _knows_ , and they’re disappointed too. It’s only ten minutes to the hour, but his parents are waiting outside. They’ll come in, they’ll sit and talk while he waits outside, they’ll have to hear how their son has taken a thousand steps back. He has to start over, all this has been for nothing. 

He doesn’t meet their eyes when he gingerly creaks open the door. Nor when they ask if he’s okay, if he wants to sit in the room while the adults talk. He just shakes his head slowly and heads back to take a seat in the dreary beige waiting room. Beside him, Violet silently hands him the book he’d been reading. She doesn’t have to ask to know how he feels: defeated and useless and frustrated. Uncomfortable in his own skin, even more so than usual. She won’t ask him about it until they’re home again, tucked safely away from the world. In the meantime, he open the book to a random page and stares at the word until his vision starts to get all prickly around the edges. 

(The word is _’repetition’_.)

He wants more than anything to cry, to tap into that angry, inky reservoir that’s been sitting in the shallow basin of his ribs all morning. He waits, and waits, and waits for the tears to start dripping onto that one word like a leaky faucet. 

But even with all that bleach and vomit and teeth and bile and blood, nothing comes up.


End file.
